Nudges and friction
Choice design with a thumb on the scale: make a helpful action easier, or add a pause before a costly mistake.
See it
What it is
A nudge makes one behavior easier or more noticeable without removing the alternatives. Friction does the reverse: it adds effort, time, or a pause before an action. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein put the word into circulation with Nudge in 2008. Smart defaults, timely reminders, and putting the likely next step first are nudges. GitHub making you type a repository's full name before it will delete it, and a bank showing the payee and amount before the transfer goes, are deliberate friction.
Use nudges for beneficial, reversible actions and friction where a fast mistake is expensive. The useful test is proportionality: subscribing to a calendar can be one click, publishing to 50,000 people deserves a review, and permanently deleting their work deserves an unmistakable confirmation.
The gotcha is that the same tools make dark patterns. A preselected upsell is still a nudge, and a hidden cancellation flow is still friction, but both serve the metric instead of the person. Keep choices visible, make consequences concrete, and apply similar effort to opposite actions. If joining takes one click and leaving takes a phone call, the design is coercion, not guidance.
Ask AI for it
Redesign this flow with ethical nudges and proportional friction. For the common reversible action, use a clearly labelled smart default, HTML autocomplete attributes, and inline validation connected with aria-describedby. For the irreversible action, open a native dialog with showModal(), state exactly what will be lost, require the user to type the affected item's name, and keep Cancel as the initial focus. Do not precheck consent, disguise an upsell, hide Skip, or make the reverse action harder than the original one.